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Normally I don’t spend too much time watching Celebrity Big Brother, especially as I don’t know most of the people in there. Ok, there are some:

Evander Holyfield, legend of the boxing ringLionel Blair, stage entertainerJim Davidson, supposed comedianLinda Nolan, one of the NolansLee Ryan, one of the boys from BlueDappy, the one from N-Dubz

But who are the others and why are they all jumping into bed with each other after less than a week?

Who is Casey Batchelor?
Who is Jasmine Waltz?
Who is Liz Jones?
Who is Luisa Zissman?
Who is Ollie Locke?
Who is Sam Faiers?

Perhaps I just don’t watch enough TV.

Anyway, onto todays task – I watched the end of CBB a couple of nights ago and saw the housemates answering general questions. To my delight there was a maths question, which they all got wrong. Someone might have got it right, but I must have missed it.

So here’s the question – post your answer below and don’t worry if you get it wrong, I’ll just put you in with the Celebrity maths group…Please don’t cheat and look it up…

Firstly, the answer is 5, using the usual BODMAS / PEDMAS rules of maths.

During one of my first lessons at high school, my maths teacher asked us all to get our calculators out and try out this calculation:

1 + 2 x 3

Anyone with a calculator showing 9 had to put their calculators away, and purchase a brand new Casio calculator that followed BODMAS rules. This was at the hefty cost of £15 at the time (ok, it was close on 20 years ago), which I’m sure was worth the money as it showed the ‘correct’ answer of 7.

BODMAS / PEDMAS

For those who don’t know or have forgotten, maths follows strict rules of calculation. Known as BODMAS (or PEDMAS in some regions), the order of calculation is:

Bod was quite a popular childrens program when I was growing up, so this was quite easy to remember – the cartoons are all on youtube! Using these rules our original calculation needs to be done as follows:

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Thanks to those of you who took part in the little maths problem last week. It was interesting to see the variety of answers coming out. I’m not sure how the first 3 were calculated, but I will try to explain some of the other ones…

9) And the most popular (so clearly wrong?) was 200 because the pattern is 10 * 10 * 2 = 200

UPDATED 25/01/2014 due to additional possibilities:10) 62. To get this, you need to remove the equals sign and calculate the difference between the numbers – this difference increases by 4 between each pair of numbers. So, 432 – 318 = 114, 550 – 432 = 118, 672 – 550 = 122, 798 – 672 = 126. The next number will be 798 + 130 = 928, 928 + 134 = 1062. Now reinstate the = to give 10=62. Phew. Thanks to Tony Bialorucki for this answer.

11) ?. Yes question mark. If you read it as a set of statements rather than a question, then 10=?. Thanks to sik for this answer.

There are several issues with how this problem is written, which means you could end up with almost any answer given the correct logic –
First, it starts off with a statistic (99.9%) which is to entice you attempt an answer.
Second, the question itself is not correctly worded. It should go along the lines of ‘Complete the following sequence…’
Thirdly, the calculations are clearly all incorrect, so you could almost put any number down. The logic is deliberately vague

When I originally did this problem, my first answer was 160. This was because I didn’t read the question properly (a problem my 9 year old often has), and assumed it was asking for the next number in the sequence – 8 = 160!

So, what is the answer?

It’s 200, although I did like the 10 from The Penguin as this is the only answer which is true!